Stephen Colbert to be guest in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s ‘Faces of America’

This is interesting: BusinessWire is reporting that Stephen Colbert will join a number of illustrious guests on the upcoming PBS series Faces of America, hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. From BusinessWire (emphasis in original):

THIRTEEN, Kunhardt McGee Productions and Inkwell Films, in Production on New PBS Series, Faces of America
Presented and written by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ‘Faces of America’ takes the quest begun in ‘African American Lives’ and ‘African American Lives 2’ to a new level to provide an understanding of American identity and history
June 30, 2009 10:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

. . .

Global in scope, Faces of America will look beyond the black experience to explore American identity with guests who are Asian, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Syrian, West Indian, and Native American. Joining Professor Gates in this new series are poet Elizabeth Alexander, who composed and read the poem at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, chef Mario Batali, comedian and television personality Stephen Colbert, writer Junot Diaz, writer Louise Erdrich, writer Malcolm Gladwell, actress Eva Longoria, cellist Yo Yo Ma, writer and director Mike Nichols, former monarch of Jordan Queen Noor, actress Meryl Streep, and Olympic gold medalist and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi.

Too expensive for popular use, to date, less than 20 people have had their entire genome sequenced. Working with Illumina and Knome and geneticists at the Broad Institute and the Harvard Medical School, Faces of America will make medical history by filming the sequencing and interpretation of the genomes – six billion base pairs – of Professor Gates and his father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr. In addition, each guest will undergo dense genotyping to trace their father’s line, mother’s line and their admixture (that is their percentages of European, Asian, Native American, and African ancestry).

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Read the full item here

In his most recent visit to The Colbert Report, Professor Gates talked with Stephen about Lincoln (and a shocking “revelation” about Jesus) but, in his first appearance, the two spoke at length about African American Lives and the impetus for the series. As Faces of America sounds like an interesting expansion of that idea, I’d say it’s worth another look now:

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